Polarization Is About to Get a Lot Worse: Students Are Even More Divided than We Are

American students attending major research universities will be the country's future leaders, but they are likely to be more politically divided than in past generations.

These are the findings of a new Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) campus survey—an annual poll of tens of thousands of students with a goldmine of information on the demographics and political views of young Americans. What jumps out most from the survey is how important race, gender, religion and sexual identity is for their politics, and how unimportant their economic situation is. And because identity is more personal than economics, this suggests that political compromise will be even harder to achieve among the elite of tomorrow than it is today.

Let's start with sexual orientation. 23 percent of students, including 28 percent of female students, identify as LGBT. In a number of liberal arts colleges such as Smith and Wesleyan, up to half the student body identifies as something other than heterosexual. Relatedly, fewer than 5 percent of students say they are conservative.

Continue reading the entire piece here at Newsweek

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Eric Kaufmann is professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London and an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute.

This piece originally appeared in Newsweek